The Cuomo administration is preparing to shove thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers out of supervised settings  where they can be forced to take their medication  into far less restrictive, far more dangerous community housing.

Albany, under pressure from the Obama administration, recently ordered psychiatric facilities not to place any discharged patients in adult homes, where staff can ensure they take their meds.

Instead, theyll be placed in community housing, without full-time supervision.

This is part of the states plan to essentially empty adult homes into community-based supportive apartments, leaving up to 6,000 people  including those with schizophrenia  to live on their own, with minimal supervision.

Not all of us are that way.
But enough do suffer a mental disconnect that keeps the rest of us from making a difference.
Plus, New York has long had an issue with Imperial Governance in Albany.
[We actually did have signage that read “Mario M. Cuomo, Emperor” as you entered NY.]

NY elected representatives also brought to the world “Tammany Hall” style politics.
Not all of the state is Albany or NY City.

In 1975 liberal elites watched 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. They decided en masse that those locked up were 'wise liberal hippies' in waiting... So they dumped the crazies on the streets of working class neighborhoods.

It's how liberals gave us the homeless and hopeless to undermine our values... This choice - one more liberal 'feel good about themselves' choice - was a crime against those in need and a crime against working class families.

A twofer for evil liberal elites.

15
posted on 01/01/2013 10:28:23 AM PST
by GOPJ
(It's not possible to be a Progressive and not be a hypocrite. Freeper TigersEye.)

This policy change on its face makes no sense. It is a reprise of the deinstitutionalization fiasco of the 60s and 70s. So follow the money. This is Obamacare in action. Facilities for the seriously mentally ill, with 24/7 supervision, are very expensive. "community homes," which will quickly become unsafe and unsanitary garbage dumps, not nearly as much.

This is the Obama philosophy: Save the money, let them loose, and if they die, they die. It does not account for those who survive long enough to be readmitted to psych hospitals, only to go around the track one more time.

Well, we find the dumbest satire ideas out there and “suggest” them to the NY reps.
NY will be in flames rapidly because the Reps are idiots and often actually do what the satire says.
Once the pitchfork and torch crew arises, we make an active attempt to rebuild while everyone is distracted.

The modern de-institutionalization movement was started in 1963 with Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act. The idea was to replace custodial institutions with group homes, halfway houses etc, and a network of Commnuity Mental Health Centers for consistent and intensive outpatient followup.

States were happy to cut budgets for state hospitals but the CMHC's often never materialized. The Feds having passed a bill with mandates to the states, moved on to other things, and the system was never fully built out as envisioned.

The book One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey was inspired by his experience working as a psych orderly at the Menlo Park VA, and came out about the same time as the legislation was being shaped in Congress. They were both expressions of the Zeitgeist and there is no reason to believe that one caused the other.

I remember years ago when my best friend's brother, who suffered from schizophrenia, drove 280 miles from northern Michigan and showed up at my apartment.

He was off his meds and he told me the reason he came down was because he had an appointment with the French embassy in Detroit the next day to discuss expanding Michigan's railway system in order to better service northern Michigan.....

While I had to work the next day, he still spent the night on my couch and was gone by the time I got home from work.

28
posted on 01/01/2013 10:52:37 AM PST
by Hot Tabasco
(Jab her with a harpoon.....)

I, for one, won’t fire upon you. Rudy did a hell of a job cleaning up the city. During the first year of Bloomberg’s endless and illegal tenure, the homeless were back on the streets sleeping in cardboard boxes.

They’ve probably been playing endless loop audio while these crazies were sleeping:

“Get an assault weapon with a huge magazine, go to a school, a theater, a mall, or some crowded place. The voices you have been hearing are in these places. You must kill everyone there to silence the voices. Then you must shoot yourself, too. You will then come back as a new person and you won’t hear the voices anymore. If you don’t kill yourself, you will still hear the voices.”

Loop back to start.

33
posted on 01/01/2013 11:02:19 AM PST
by Right Wing Assault
(Dick Obama is more inexperienced now than he was before he was elected.)

Build a wall along the west side of the Hudson—a wall without gates. Don’t push for your states to secede. Push for the secession of New York, New Jersey and California from the United States. Send the strays back to those places, except for the few who could pass a test showing that they can mind their own personal business instead of their neighbors’.

36
posted on 01/01/2013 11:19:35 AM PST
by familyop
(We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of rotten politics smelled around the planet.)

California, and its Mental Health Services Act, is part of the “community based services” movement. That is where you serve the mentally ill out in the community integrated with families and other social service clients rather than at a centralized separate spot.

County mental health is now basically a triage/crisis service. They stabilize folks in crisis. That’s it. There is no money for actual treatment. Now treatment is all pharmaceutical anyway, so it is just monitoring of meds. Crisis is generally when someone has “gone off their meds.”

The MHSA is supposed to provide money for “clients” to congregate during the day. Because Health Clinic provide money for additional services, the congregation is often done in connection with health clinics or community resource centers. This can mix family populations with children with the mentally ill.

In CA, the State Dept. of mental health is just about gone. They have “devolved” the problem to the Counties through “realignment.” Smaller counties haven’t the resources to handle it and are overwhelmed. Oversight is maintained through rigid computerized reporting systems and audits.

Shortly after the creep’s election, I had to walk through the mid 30s on the westside - around Macys & Penn Station. They were all back in the doorways of office buildings. They probably had a celebratory toast to Bloomberg with Ripple and Colt 45.

You're right - the ideas came to fruition 60’s - and were probably written about before that... but the movement came into it's own in the 70’s. One Flew over the Cockoos Nest was to deinstitutionalization what Rachel Carson's ‘Silent Spring’ was to the ecology movement. More than correlation - less than causation.

43
posted on 01/01/2013 11:53:33 AM PST
by GOPJ
(It's not possible to be a Progressive and not be a hypocrite. Freeper TigersEye.)

Rudy was the greatest. He turned NYC from a sewer into a place that was habitable. People on the right who live elsewhere didn’t get how smart and strong he was. They wanted someone who was exactly like them to be president - their provincialism and intransigence led to the garbage we have now. In the long run, they were not a lot different from the idiot blacks who voted for 0 because they thought he looked like them.

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